The Controversy Surrounding Assisted Suicide and Whether It Should Be Legalized or Not and It Gives Example Cases from Around the World

Article: Over my dead body

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The text describes the controversy surrounding assisted suicide and whether it should be legalized or not and it gives example cases from around the world.

Summary

Voters in Massachusetts will decide next month whether a terminally ill patient with less than six months to live should be able to use a doctor’s help in committing suicide. If they assent, as the polls suggest, the state will be the third, after Oregon and Washington, to legalize assisted suicide. New Jersey introduced a bill last month to decriminalize it. The Montana Supreme Court has ruled that doctors cannot be prosecuted for prescribing lethal drugs for terminally ill patients.

When Jack Kevorkian, an American doctor jailed after admitting helping 130 patients to die, first went on trial in 1994, assisting suicide was a crime everywhere in Switzerland. Now the trend is spreading far and wide (though not in Asia or in Muslim countries where it is still taboo).

Only in Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, where assisted suicide has been permitted since 1942, are the non-terminally ill eligible.

Oregon’s legislation is widely admired. An eligible applicant must be a mentally competent adult, suffering from a terminal illness and with less than six months left to live. He must have been told about alternatives such as hospice care and pain control, and he must have asked his doctor at least three times to be allowed to die. A second doctor must review the case both for the accuracy of the prognosis and to certify that no pressure has been exerted.  

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